It's a curious thing high functioning autism. Whatever we lack in social awareness, we tend to compensate by a knack for noticing patterns, problem solving, diagnostic skills which combined allow for rules to be developed. Following them makes for such efficient masking we often get "I never would have thought you were autistic, maybe just a bit quiet..." Any idea where "quiet" comes from? Well to me it stems from one area where no amount of rule making helps, there are no patterns to recognise, and which is therefore still the most challenging to me – human relationships. In this particular case “levels” of relationships.
What makes a friend? How do you become a friend? How do you know you are now friends and not acquaintances? How and when does one become a friend with a colleague? Things are confusing and some personal challenges are:
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I cannot do small talk for the life of me. It is forced and tedious. In particular, I am completely unable to talk about the weather. Like it is right there, so what, what can we possibly do about it?
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I am not at all into football. Being in UK, that’s like a deterrent for 80% of people.
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Whilst small talking you may accidentally touch my interest, a topic where I DO have an opinion and suddenly we have an opposite problem. By the time I notice you want me to shut up it is far too late.
So as a general rule of thumb I don’t engage. Also, because to me talking is difficult, draining and requires emotionally engagement, I tend to save it for people I like. And hence it took years of experience and lots of misunderstandings to realise that people bothering to talk to me does not equal them liking me any more than anybody else or that they want to be friends. People just talk.
So when a colleague came over to me on purpose for a chat, without needing help or anything, that brought all the thoughts up and confused me again. Not right away, the next day. Like does it mean anything, as in do we like talk more now than just “good morning” or was it a box ticking exercise? Are there now expectations on me to engage more or am I OK continuing not to that much? I wouldn’t even know what to talk with her about because I don’t think we are interested in the same topics.
Then again with colleagues that I do have things in common and actually do try to engage and even have a Whatsapp group outside work there is too little engagement to indicate a friendship brewing process. And in their case I would actually like to be friends but they often don’t respond to my messages and never really initiate any themselves. So to me that equals they don’t want to.
I have observed people make friends at work and continue to be friends after (using this term because they do, what a “friend” mean is a whole other topic), but how? I don’t want to annoy people or overstep the boundaries or anything but then there is being “unapproachable”? And even with people I manage to click and click well in universities or at work, the friendship seems to melt as soon as I leave the job or uni ended. They don’t reach out, stop replying to messages and then just “poof!” and gone.
I just don’t understand any of it and there is no “how to” manual I’m afraid.
